With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, nineteen-year-old Harley Altmyer cares for his three sisters in a small Pennsylvania coal town, but despite his responsibilities, he is still a teenage boy and lusts after the mother of two who lives down the road.

In 1918, Maureen Ross struggles to deal with a difficult pregnancy and her emotionally abusive husband Troop, until the arrival of Troop's niece, Mary Oliver, the child of a wealthy, freethinking family who sets out to protect her aunt.

Minister's daughter Olivia Dunne, pushed into a hastily arranged marriage to beet farmer Ray Singleton after a one-night stand with a departing American soldier leaves her pregnant, slowly relinquishes her long-held dreams of study and travel as she comes to love and admire her husband.

"George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career;...